The stone archway shimmered with shifting glyphs as Kai led Mari and Willam into the training crucible.
Inside, the chamber unfolded like a dream forged in arcane fire, hexagonal platforms hovered over a bottomless void, mana storms surged in calculated intervals, and glowing nodes pulsed at the arena's centre like beating hearts.
A perfect simulation of a real Crucible match.
Perfectly brutal.
They failed the first run within seven minutes.
The second, even faster.
By the ninth failure, the silence between them was louder than any spell they had cast.
The average match of Arcane Crucible fell around the fifteen-minute mark, but they couldn't even last half of that.
Mari knelt on a floating platform, breathing heavily, runes half-sketched in radiant gold beneath her fingertips. Willam stood with his arms crossed, muttering equations to himself, eyes darting through spatial trajectories like he was solving a murder.
Kai didn't speak. He didn't need to.
He felt the flaw.
